National Art Museum of Ukraine

Stand at the foot of the steps for a moment. Under your shoes, the pavement of Hrushevskoho Street slopes gently downhill toward the river. Above you, six pale columns hold up a triangular pediment crowded with carved figures. Two stone lions sit on either side of the stairs, calm and heavy, looking out at the traffic. Behind you are the trees of the park and the curve of the football stadium. This is the National Art Museum of Ukraine, and it holds the long story of Ukrainian painting.

The building went up at the very end of the nineteenth century. It was designed in the style of a Greek temple, with a portico of sturdy, plain columns in the Doric manner, the oldest and simplest of the classical orders. The architect Vladyslav Horodetsky, a name you will meet often in Kyiv, oversaw the construction. A few streets away he later built his own house, decorated with stone frogs, rhinos and elephants. Here he worked in a much calmer mood — formal, balanced, and serious.

Look up at the pediment, the triangle above the columns. The sculpted group there is an allegory of the arts. Figures representing painting, sculpture and music gather around a central figure of triumph. The work is usually credited to the Italian sculptor Emilio Sala. From the street it is easy to miss the details, so take a moment. Find the faces, the folds of cloth, and the small objects each figure holds.

Here is a surprise. When the doors first opened in 1899, this was not an art gallery at all. It was a city museum of antiquities and art. The founders wanted to collect archaeology, craft, coins and old objects from across the region, as well as pictures. Private patrons supported it generously. Among them were Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko, a collector couple whose own mansion is now a separate museum in the city.

Over the following decades, the collections grew and then split apart. Archaeology and history went to other institutions. Paintings, icons and sculpture stayed here. The building slowly became what you see today — a museum dedicated to Ukrainian fine art. It took its present national name in the 1990s, after Ukraine became independent. That change matters. For much of the twentieth century, Ukrainian art was often presented as a regional footnote to a larger Soviet story. Here it stands at the centre.

Step inside, and the noise of the street drops away. The halls are tall and quiet, with wooden floors that creak a little under your weight. Many visitors begin with the icons, and that is a good place to start. The oldest pieces reach back to the medieval period. You will see saints on wooden panels, with gold backgrounds, dark eyes and long, narrow faces. Some panels have cracks running through the paint, where the wood moved over centuries.

As you walk on, the icons begin to change. Faces become rounder and more human. Clothes start to look like real fabric. Landscapes and small buildings appear behind the saints. This is the influence of the Ukrainian Baroque, a lively, ornamental style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Local painters mixed Byzantine tradition with ideas arriving from Central Europe. The result feels both sacred and earthy, and it is quite different from Russian icon painting of the same period.

Nearby you will find portraits from the Cossack era. Colonels and their wives look out from heavy frames, dressed in fur, brocade and embroidered sashes. Coats of arms and inscriptions often fill the corners of the canvas. These paintings were statements of status as much as likenesses. Look at the hands and the jewellery. The painters often spent more care on rings and buttons than on the faces themselves.

The nineteenth-century rooms belong to a more familiar kind of painting. Here you meet Taras Shevchenko, the national poet, who was also a trained artist. Then come painters such as Mykola Pymonenko, who loved village life, market days and sunlight on white cottage walls. Pay attention to the light in these canvases. Many artists worked hard to capture the bright, dusty glare of a Ukrainian summer afternoon. Some of the warmest moments in the collection hang in these rooms.

Further on, the mood shifts again. In the early twentieth century, Kyiv was one of the places where the European avant-garde took shape. Artists such as Oleksandr Bohomazov and Oleksandra Exter broke images into planes, rhythms and strong colour. Their work can feel sudden after the quiet village scenes. It is a reminder that modern art did not only happen in Paris. Some of its boldest experiments happened right here, a short walk from this hall.

Now for the second surprise, and it comes from very recent history. In the winter of 2014, during the protests known as the Euromaidan, some of the fiercest clashes took place on this street, almost at the museum's front steps. Smoke, burning tyres and barricades filled the space where you stood a few minutes ago. Staff stayed close to protect the building and its collection. Later, the museum turned those events into a subject for exhibitions, treating them as part of the country's story.

Since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, the museum has carried on under difficult conditions. Like many Ukrainian institutions, it moved precious works to safer storage. Yet it kept opening rooms and organising exhibitions, often about identity, memory and resistance. The displays you see today may change from visit to visit. That is worth keeping in mind. Some famous pieces may be resting in storage, while new or rarely seen works take their place on the walls.

Before you leave, walk back out between the columns and stop at the top of the steps. Turn and look down the street toward the park and the river. The two lions are still there, looking out at the same view. Behind you hang centuries of saints, Cossacks, villagers and modern dreamers. In front of you, ordinary Kyiv life carries on — buses, footsteps, people talking on their phones. Take a breath here before you step back into it.